Meldarth

For three years, he wasn't allowed to speak to her. On his 21st birthday, he wrote one letter. She was engaged to someone else. He got on a train anyway. January 3, 1913. Oxford, England. J.R.R. Tolkien sat down the night before his 21st birthday and wrote a letter he'd been composing in his head for three years. Dear Edith, I've never stopped loving you. Will you marry me? For 1,095 days, he hadn't been allowed to see her. To write to her. To speak to her name. His guardian—a Catholic priest named Father Francis Morgan—had forbidden it. Edith was Protestant. She was three years older. And worst of all, she was a distraction from Tolkien's studies at Oxford. When Father Morgan discovered their romance, he gave Tolkien an ultimatum: end it, or lose everything. The priest had raised Tolkien since his mother died when he was twelve. He'd paid for his education. He was the closest thing to a father Tolkien had. So Tolkien made a choice that would haunt him for three years. He obeyed. He stopped seeing Edith. Stopped writing. Stopped everything. And he told himself: When I turn 21, I'll be free. I'll find her. I'll ask her to wait. But three years is a long time. They'd met when Tolkien was sixteen and Edith was nineteen, both living in the same dreary boarding house in Birmingham. Both were orphans. Both were lonely. Tolkien's mother had died of diabetes when he was twelve—a death that might have been prevented if insulin had been discovered sooner. Edith's mother, an unmarried governess, died when Edith was fourteen, leaving her daughter illegitimate and alone. They found each other in that gray boarding house with its lace curtains and climbing vines. They'd sneak to tea shops and drop sugar cubes into the hats of people walking below, laughing like children. They'd sit by the window late into the night, talking until sunrise while Big Ben tolled the hours. Edith would appear in her little white nightgown at the window. They had a whistle-call. They took long bicycle rides through the countryside. Tolkien fell completely, desperately in love. But Father Morgan saw it as recklessness. When Tolkien failed his Oxford scholarship exam on the first try, the priest blamed Edith. "You will not see her again," Father Morgan commanded, "until you are twenty-one." Tolkien could have refused. Could have defied him. But Father Morgan had been more of a father to him than many real fathers. The priest had rescued him and his brother from poverty after their mother's death. Had given them a home. Had believed in Tolkien's brilliance when no one else did. So Tolkien agreed. He wrote Edith one final letter explaining why he had to disappear. Then silence. For three years. Tolkien later wrote to his own son about those years: "I had to choose between disobeying and grieving a guardian who had been a father to me, and 'dropping' the love affair until I was 21. It was extremely hard, especially at first. I fell back into folly and slackness." But he never stopped thinking about Edith. And as midnight approached on January 2, 1913—the night before his 21st birthday—he wrote the letter he'd been rehearsing for 1,095 days. He posted it that night. A week later, Edith's reply arrived. I thought you'd forgotten me. I'm engaged to someone else. Tolkien read those words and refused to accept them. He didn't write back. He didn't send another letter. He got on a train to Cheltenham, where Edith was staying with family friends. Edith met him at the train platform. They spent the entire day together, walking through the countryside, talking about everything that had happened in three years of silence. And by the end of that day, Edith had made her decision. She returned her engagement ring to her fiancé. And accepted Tolkien's proposal. They were officially engaged—three years and one day after they'd been forced apart. They married on March 22, 1916, in a small Catholic church in Warwick during World War I. It was a Wednesday—the same day of the week they'd been reunited in 1913. Edith had converted to Catholicism for him, a sacrifice that estranged her from her remaining family. Weeks later, Tolkien was sent to France to fight. He survived the trenches, but came home sick with trench fever. While recovering in hospitals over two years, he began writing the mythology that would eventually become The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. But the most important story—the one that would run through everything he ever wrote—came from a single afternoon with Edith. They were living in Yorkshire while Tolkien recovered. They took a walk in the woods. In a clearing filled with blooming hemlock, Edith began to dance. Tolkien watched his wife—her dark hair catching the light, her eyes bright, her movements effortless and joyful—and saw something mythic. Years later, he would write to his son Christopher after Edith's death: "In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance." That moment became the story of Beren and Lúthien. A mortal man who falls in love with an immortal elf maiden. A love so powerful it defies death itself. A story where love requires sacrifice, where lovers face impossible odds, where devotion means giving up everything. It was Tolkien and Edith's story, disguised as myth. They were married for fifty-five years. It wasn't always easy. Edith never fully embraced academic life. She struggled with Catholicism. Tolkien buried himself in his work. But they chose each other, over and over. They worried obsessively about each other's health. They wrapped each other's birthday presents with ridiculous care. When Tolkien retired, he moved them to Bournemouth—a resort town Edith loved—even though he found it boring. He chose her happiness over his own comfort. Just as he'd chosen to wait three years when he could have rebelled. Edith died on November 29, 1971, at age eighty-two. Tolkien was devastated. In a letter to Christopher, he wrote: "But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos." In the mythology he'd created, Mandos was the judge of death who had reunited Beren and Lúthien. But in real life, Tolkien had to wait. He died twenty-two months later, on September 2, 1973. They're buried together in a single grave in Oxford. The headstone reads: EDITH MARY TOLKIEN LÚTHIEN 1889–1971 JOHN RONALD REUEL TOLKIEN BEREN 1892–1973 The man who created Middle-earth, who invented entire languages and mythologies, who wrote one of the greatest love stories in literature—lived it first. He waited three years in silence. He got on a train when she was engaged to someone else. He watched her dance in the woods and built a mythology around that single moment. And when she died, he inscribed her name on their shared grave as the immortal elf who chose mortality for love. Because the greatest fantasy Tolkien ever wrote was just the shadow of the real thing.

It's tough to be a DM, baby! 😀

Player: "I'm playing a Ranged Cleric this time" DM: "Ranged Cleric?"

I'd play this. 😈😀